Remember the time I expressed scepticism about the claim that Halo would be one of the biggest releases of the year, bigger than Spiderman 3 and Harry Potter 7? Well, turns out I underestimated it, since Halo 3, as reported by the Beeb, is the biggest selling media release in one day ever, beating previous record holder Spiderman 3 (and therefore beating Harry as well).
Just goes to show – video games are big business, and even legends like me can make mistakes 
!
The walk up to the school is not much fun in the pouring rain on a Tuesday afternoon, or the frosty cold of a Thursday morning, especially if you spent the weekend at home with a severe cold and a headache. My attendance has not been perfect, but what can I do? When I don’t come up I miss a lesson and receive a stern lecture. When I do, half the time there is no lesson, so I’ve walked all that way for nothing.
Today was one such instance, but at least now I know what I’m doing in my metaphorical journey – that is, the critical study. I e-mailed Adam this question:
“To what extent has the increase in mainstream television dramas dealing with fantastic or speculative subject matter (e.g. Heroes, Doctor Who, Lost, etc.) coincided with, or directly influenced, an increased public interest in science fiction and fantasy?”
He said it was OK, so I’m beginning work on it now. I might need to modify it a bit to make it more relevant to the subject (plus I reckon it’s a little wordy, personally) but apart from that, I’m ready to go!
I haven’t been skiving, I’ve been really ill, so thanks everyone for caring. To make up for it, I analysed another video.
Green Day are a very popular band, but they’re also a controversial band because they keep alienating significant portions of their fanbase. This song was a single from Dookie, the band’s major label debut. I’ve chosen it to analyse because of the unusual techniques used in it.
1. This video was shot in an insane asylum, and one of the first sights we see is of men in white coats and a steel shutter door being closed. The whole video was shot in black and white, and then colourised, contributing to the eerie, demented feel of the video. Visible in the first shot is a masked inmate who’s mask is the only thing that is colourised, making him look odd and out of place. We see close ups of the music equipment being set up, and a white-suited guy presents a rather nervous and confused Billie-Joe Armstrong (i.e. one who looks like is suffering from some kind of breakdown) with a guitar. He abruptly comes out of character and begins to play.
2. The other band members are wheeled in. It is clear that they are inmates, both by their slightly confused and abnormal behaviour and the way people in white coats are directing them around. This is especially apparent for Mike Dirnt. Close ups are used to show Armstrong’s eyes darting around nervously as he sings. Note that this song is itself about a kind of mental breakdown, so the video fits the lyrics quite well.
3. In the second verse, we see Armstrong standing against a white wall in a shower room. A high-angled camera shot makes him look small and insignificant, and yet his black clothes make him stand out. We see Tré Cool being wheeled down a corridor in a wheel chair by a white-coated man – note one of the masked dudes like the one at the start in the background. It cuts back to Armstrong (the room is more clearly identifiable as a shower room in this instance) and then to Dirnt, who is looking bored, resting his head in his hands.
4. This seems an appropriate place to comment on the performance element of the video. We see plenty of shots of different band members playing the song, as though performing live (they may well play like this in the studio too, I guess). Frequent cuts from different angles stop the audience from losing interest. A brief cut to Dirnt staring out of a window, perhaps in desperation, cuts back to him performing, then a shot of Armstrong is obscured by a masked figure walking past the camera. A barrage of rapid cuts echoes the machine gun-like drum roll. Note more masks.
5. Cool is wheeled to a counter where a white-coated woman provides him with some sort of medicine or drug. He grins as he swallows it. “Grasping to control..” sings Armstrong as the camera pans around, showing various people behind him. The pan is jerky, as though performed with a handheld camera, contributing to the surreal nature of the video.
6. OK, so what about those people in masks wandering around? They seem to be doing a lot of strange things, creeping around, playing with exercise balls, and coming right up to the camera. They seem to be the inmates, and they remain uncolourised (except the masks themselves) throughout, which makes them look decidedly weird. More so even than the drugs we are shown close ups of. There is more crazy stuff as first Cool, and later Armstrong, is surrounded by flying fishes and his own eyes – a hallucination caused by the drugs seen earlier, perhaps? It’s interesting to note that Cool smiles whereas Armstrong looks kind of confused. Dirnt smashes a window in a fit of apparent frustration.
7. The video is full of bright colours which makes it seem simplistic and, at the same time, OTT. This contributes to the feelings of crazyness. We see a white coated man inspecting the window that Dirnt smashed, which I found rather amusing.
8. At the end of the video, the metal shutter is closed in front of the camera. This place is closed, and it seems Green Day are to remain inside. Through the shutter we see them stop playing and just stand there.
Kind of loopy, kind of disturbing, or a clever portrayal of anxiety disorder? Make what you will of it. Personally, I think it rocks, but that’s just me. Make up your own mind on YouTube.
Fingers crossed I’ll be back in school tomorrow. The least catching up I have to do, the easier time I’ll have.
Bored and with nothing better to do one ”study” period (i.e. as I am typing this) I was browsing Adam’s website. It includes a link to this site, which is pretty helpful for the critical research study:
http://www.longroadmedia.com/yr13_research.html
I may make use of it in future (i.e. the next time I am bored with nothing better to do).
I’m considering focusing on either ”world cinema” or ”TV drama” at the moment (something tells me that “Why does community radio suck?” would not be considered an appropriate question).
That’s considering. My journey has not yet started.
The number of hits for this blog has gone up, not dramatically, but nonetheless noticeably, since I wrote an analysis of “Just”. There are lots of people who want to know what the man says. Why do they all lie down? What could he possibly say to make them do that?
The answer is… well, nobody knows. Radiohead certainly aren’t saying. I’ve read various suggestions – “Down is the new up” (which is the name of a then-unpremiered and still-unreleased Radiohead song), perhaps? Or maybe “Radiohead are playing in a flat up there, and if you lie down on the ground and tilt your head like this, you can hear them through the pavement”?
We don’t know, and the frequent cuts mean you can’t lipread it. For all we know it’s gibberish.
But that’s not the point. It’s all about your interpretation. What do you think he says? That’s what makes it clever.
Personally, I would say that what he says doesn’t matter. It’s the effect it has on the people who hear it that’s important. He had a good reason for lying there, and wouldn’t tell them what that was because he didn’t want to put them through it as well. They pressed him, and they paid the price for their curiosity. They did it to themselves, and that’s what really hurts.
So just be grateful you don’t know, else you’d lie down on the pavement too…
My Chemical Romance are not the most widely respected of rock bands, but you can’t really fault them on the music video front. I was spoilt for choice for which to analyse – should I do “I Don’t Love You” (clever use of CGI, and bursting with semiology and mise-en-scène points, plus blowing up a guitar and an amp in slow motion always looks cool) or “The Ghost Of You” (cuts between a 1940s dance, complete with ’40s guitars and haircuts, and the D-Day landing, combined with a touching narrative) or maybe “Welcome To The Black Parade” (mixes bizarre narrative about a terminally ill patient with dark homage to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)? In the end I decided on “Helena”.
1. The setting of this one is a church, with everyone dressed in funeral gear (black suits etc.). Visually speaking, this whole video has quite a gothic tone (more on that later). At the start, Gerard Way is standing at the pulpit in front of some candles. A close-up on some order of service-type booklets tells us that this is “In Memory of Helena”. People file into the church, incense is wafted around and mourners pass a coffin where the body of a young woman (presumably named Helena) is lying. A close-up shows a woman’s crying face.
2. There are many frequent cuts between two scenes – the first, the band performing at the front of the church, the second, Gerard Way in the pulpit singing as the mourners dance. In the latter, Gerard Way is cast as some sort of preacher, leading the service.
3. When the chorus begins, Gerard Way lifts his arms and the mourners stand up with books and sing along (inaudibly) as though singing a hymn. At the end of the chorus, they sit down again.
4. During the second verse, there are frequent close-ups of the band playing. Mention should perhaps be made at this point of Gerard Way’s performance style. Simply put, it’s a little OTT, but his expressions and hand gestures are undeniably emotive. A high-angled shot is used to show the dancers lying on the floor and moving into various poses, possibly, given the context, symbolising death.
5. The congregation stands up again for the second chorus, and Gerard Way falls to his knees at the front of the church and reaches out, wide-eyed, towards the camera, which zooms in on him. The other musicians are shown briefly, and a pan shows the mourners singing, but the main focus of the camera is Gerard Way, and the dancers writhing behind him. He looks up to the sky as though despairing or crying to a loved one in Heaven, and a high-angle shot emphasises this. There are several cuts between him and the corpse, until, at the end of the chorus, he shuts his eyes…
6. …And the corpse opens her eyes. At this point everyone bows their heads and puts their hands together as though in prayer, and while their eyes are closed, the corpse dances down the aisle, unseen by any of them. This is a very gothic image, to my mind. A close-up shows her feet lowering themselves to the ground, and then there she is, in all her pale, undead glory. Tossing her bunch of flowers aside, she moves down the church, passing her hand over the head of a praying woman, and comes right up close to the camera, seizing it (note that the fourth wall is broken). Then she pushes it away and twirls around in a graceful, ballet-esque manner, before – this is clever – there is a cut to her feet twirling and coming to a halt, and when the camera cuts back, she is holding the flowers to her chest, gives a little gasp, shuts her eyes and falls backwards. Then there is another cut, and she lands back in the coffin. This whole sequence is very weird, and perhaps symbolises that her spirit lives on, or maybe a voyage to the afterlife.
7. I’m singin’ in the rain… oh, no, wait a minute, that’s something else. Cut to outside where we see some appropriately black umbrellas being put up and the mourners dance with them. It is raining heavily as MCR (plus one extra) carry the coffin down the steps. There are more close-ups of Gerard Way’s face as he sings, now displaying an expression of grief.
8. From inside the hearse, we see the coffin being loaded into the vehicle. Gerard Way shuts the door with a loud thud, this being the only use of diagetic sound in the video. He looks in through the window in the door at the coffin, perhaps saying a final goodbye to the deceased. His expression is grave. Then he turns and walks away. The funeral – and the song – is over.
And that’s the analysis. Morbid, or what? Anyway, here’s the video on YouTube. Sorry about the resolution; it used to be available in shiny Warner label-uploaded format, no less, but that video is no longer available.
Links to the music videos I have analysed so far can be found at the bottom of each analysis. Unfortunately, something bad happened recently, which I discovered quite by chance when testing out a pair of speakers. YouTube removed the video of Tribute due to failure to comply with their ”terms of use”. I don’t know why this is. After all, the BBC claims that all four major labels make their videos available on YouTube. Tenacious D are signed to Sony BMG, which is one of the “big four” so there shouldn’t be a copyright problem.
At the moment I’ve simply changed the link to a different person’s upload of the video, but I’m just letting you know that if this persists I might not be able to always provide these kinds of links.
That is to say, Adam wants us to revive our blogs so we can chart our “journey” and since I’m a nerd, here I am.
But I don’t have any idea what I want to do. Why couldn’t it have been “sport and video games”, or “women and video games” or something about music videos? I’m not in a “films and television” frame of mind at the moment, so I’ll keep the blog updated when I am in that frame of mind.
Like “Tribute”, the music video for “Just” combines narrative with performance. Unlike “Tribute”, however, “Just” does not feature any audible speech (which would interrupt the song) and the story is played out through subtitles. Radiohead music videos are typically arty and abstract, so expect philosophical weirdness.
1. The video begins silently, showing a bathroom wall. A man walks in front of it, and then the image cuts to a zoom to show the man standing in the bathroom. There is a close up of his legs as he unwraps the towel around his waist.
2. The image cuts to a very similar shot of one of the band members’ legs, which begin to walk across the room. The band are performing the song in a flat. The image cuts to the man lowering himself into a bath, then back to the flat where Thom Yorke is singing into a mic.
3. The man is shown walking down a lane in a city between rows of trees. He wears a suit and tie and has a ‘sensible’ haircut, suggesting a boring middle class businessman.
4. The footage cuts between images of the man walking along the street and the band playing in the flat. A low angle shot shows that the man is standing outside a block of flats, suggesting that this is the block of flats where Radiohead are playing.
5. A shot of the man’s feet is used to show him lying down in the middle of the pavement. The image cuts again to the band.
6. A shot of the man lying in the street is followed by a shot of a younger, similarly dressed man with a long tie walking along and tripping over. A long shot then shows him landing sprawled near the man who is lying down. He starts to get to his feet.
7. The band are shown playing once again. There is a close up of Yorke’s legs (similar to the one used at the start of the video) as he strides across the room.
8. Yorke stands looking out the window. “Don’t get my sympathy” he sings, “hanging out the fifteenth floor”. Meanwhile, down on the street…
9. A high angled shot shows us Yorke’s POV of the events happening on the street below. Although the conversation is inaudible, subtitles tell us the man still staggering to his feet is saying “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there.” We then see a low angle shot (in other words, the man who is lying down’s POV) of him saying concernedly “Are you okay?” “Yes” replies the prone gentleman, in a close up of his face. The subtitles are white, which means they tend to stand out and remain visible. The font is a typed style as opposed to handwritten, and is a rather old fashioned style that conjures up images of offices and business, and tedium, a recurring theme in Radiohead’s songs from this period.
10. Yorke looks on, his hand against his mouth. The younger man asks if the other has fallen, but the prone man claims to be “fine”. The younger man smiles, as though suddenly realising something. “You’ve been drinking.” he exclaims.
11. When the man on the ground insists that he hasn’t been drinking, the other man moves back. “Why are you lying in the middle of the pavement?” he exclaims, gesturing angrily. “You could have broken my neck!”
12. Yorke turns around to sing the word “hell” so that he is facing the camera. His expression is quite aggressive. There are more shots of the band performing the song in the flat.
13. Back on the street, the standing man’s face is now one of concern, and he attempts to help the other man to his feet. “Don’t touch me!” cries the other man, flinching. The younger man now looks quite alarmed. The image cuts to the band again.
14. Back on the street, more onlookers have arrived. They crowd around, asking similar questions to those asked by the man with the long tie. Yorke, meanwhile, can be seen dancing wildly in the window of the flat. The man on the ground asks to be left alone. “He must be mad” exclaims one onlooker.
15. There are now very frequent cuts between the band playing and the scene in the road. The prone man insists that he is not mad. The man with the long tie crouches next to him. “Why are you lying down?” he asks. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
16. The man on the ground gives the intriguing response “Look, I can’t tell you… it wouldn’t be right.” A woman calls over to a police officer who dismounts his motorbike and comes over, helmet tucked under his arm.
17. Yorke pulls back the curtain and gazes out the window. Down at the street level, the police officer crouches next to the man on the ground and tries to move him. “Don’t touch me!” the man cries again.
18. The man with the long tie asks again why the prone man is lying there, but he replies that the other man doesn’t want to know. “You don’t think there’s any point right?” cries the long-tied chap. “That we’re all going to die here? Is that what you think?” “No.” says the prone man flatly.
19. Yorke and Johnny Greenwood are dancing wilder than ever. “Tell us for Christ’s sake!” says the police officer. The man asks if they really want to know, and the long-tied man replies “Yes!” There is an interesting close-up of the neck of Johnny’s guitar at this point; unusual, since it’s as he takes his hand off it.
20. “Yes I’ll tell you. I’ll tell why I’m lying here… but God forgive me… and God help us all… because you don’t know what you ask of me.” says the man. “Tell us!” yells the man with the long tie hysterically.
21. The man starts to tell them, but at this point the subtitles vanish, so the viewer can’t see what he’s saying. The camera pulls away as all the onlookers get to their feet, looking scared. Close-ups show the man on the ground talking. Up above, Radiohead gather at the window and survey the scene.
22. There is a fade to show all the crowd lying on the ground. As the song points out, they have done it to themselves. There are fades to the various people lying on the ground, before the image cuts to black.
Whew… that was the longest so far to analyse. Perhaps that had something to do with the relatively complex plot, or maybe I’m just sleep deficient. Anyhow, here’s a link to the video on YouTube (ignore the brief glimpse of the “High and Dry” video we get at the end, I’m not sure why they’ve included that on there). It’s a good ‘un, so enjoy.
And if you aren’t interested in media studies and want to hear my view of what the man actually says, see this post.
